


Lessons in Death

by LowDawn (EmpiricBias)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Gen, don't worry Hanzo doesn't die in this one. but it's emo, east asian mental illlness(TM)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 19:37:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19157599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmpiricBias/pseuds/LowDawn
Summary: Death is not a teacher. It does not impart things as frivolous as lessons to be learned.





	Lessons in Death

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote 95% of this in 2016 and fixed it up to post today, since I'm still damn proud of the narrative. 
> 
> Hanzo and death are a fun duo, aren't they.

Death arrives early one afternoon, in the summer. Hanzo does not expect it when he opens his eyes to an overcast sky that morning, but when he lies down to close them for the night, the memory of it lingers, leaping up the rust canvas of his eyelids like shards of lightning.

It has come close before, but never like this: the shriek of metal, the shrill of his blade; petrichor, adrenaline and wet blood, a traitor’s wounds and the wail of life as it left the body. Rain and humidity, too, making a plaster of his bangs. He wakes the next morning without actually having slept, death the first thing on his mind. It’s a terrible first impression, his father agrees when he stops by for an impromptu visit (he has been spending more time away from Hanamura, leaving castle affairs to his capable heirs in his absence), but death has never cared to go about itself gracefully. Both his father’s acknowledgement and the weight of the hand on Hanzo’s shoulder don’t make the leaden coil of his gut feel any lighter.

“Death is not a teacher,” his father tells him, reasonably. “It does not care about what it leaves behind; that is for the living to decide. Yet, they say lessons in death are not easily forgotten.”

“Yes,” Hanzo says.

His father makes an encompassing, dismissive motion. “There will be no one who can tell you otherwise, once I am gone.”

“Yes, Father,” Hanzo says, almost reproachful in tone, but even on that day he knows better than to argue. His father moves on to other subjects. He allows himself be left behind, knowing better than to follow.

When he steps onto the training mats the weight of his sword affects him as much as watching steam rise from the surface of his skin, scrubbed raw into the same ruddy red as the iron-tanged sluice staining the washroom tile floor, might be expected to affect the prince of a hundred-years-old criminal empire. He watches himself train in his mind’s eye. He imagines that the blade connects - he knows what it looks like, now. Every draw is clean, every cut meticulous.

It is still messy.

The sky is cloudless and blue like a still pool of water. Hanzo refuses to dwell on the salt wick of the sweat that beads down his scalp, his neck, his palms. He does not look into the ornamental pond, does not see the liquid glimmer of the red koi.

Genji both stands beside him and does not. This is the first time Hanzo has seen him this week, and he wouldn’t have cared enough to make note of it if he wasn’t the one everyone asked first. At the very least, Genji’s absent-mindedness is consistent; the kinds of things he makes exceptions for are too easy to predict. A handful of the season’s first summer grapes, too tart to be a well-thought-out decision; the return of a family of swallows to their annual nest, just above the sliding door of the room he never stays in; the allure of breaking in a new set of training equipment under the eye of a private instructor that is, by this point in their lives, used to seeing two Shimadas in the same place less often than once a month. Genji had always enjoyed the allure of novelty and went so far now as to apply the principle to himself.

Their routine doesn’t particularly bother Hanzo, until— as he unwinds the mess of athlete’s tape and gauze from his hands, a pile of Genji’s used gear growing beside him where they are tossed in his rush to be gone again— he realizes, with startling clarity, that his brother has beaten him to this lesson.

“What?” Genji pins him with unhidden suspicion when he notices his brother looking, his scowl an unhappy shadow across his face for the instant before he wipes everything away with a shit-eating grin. “Admiring my good looks, anija? I knew you’d admit defeat eventually.”

Hanzo doesn’t dignify that with an answer. He ties his hair back into its usual tail, and doesn’t look back before he stands from the bench, saying, “Put the equipment away before you run off.”

Genji sighs loudly, pulling his shirt over his head. “Being the handsomer brother sure makes life difficult.”

Hanzo hears him drawl; but all he recalls from those five seconds of conversation later that night is the flicker in Genji’s gaze, the quiet, blatant appraisal of his person in his eyes and the grim line of his mouth.

Had it been ten years ago? Or eleven? Hanzo can’t even remember when exactly their living quarters had been permanently separated for their safety, but Genji’s nightmares had been one of the reasons why they’d done it. He remembers that now. He remembers that _,_ and:

The wariness. The smiles. The insomnia and fear of the dark. The veneer of charm Genji learned to turn on everyone in his vicinity, drawing them all to his side like a blanket he couldn’t bear to part with. The relentless preoccupation with mastering every new weapon and school of combat their family could afford. His irritating willingness to initiate cheap contests of ability with anyone that stood a challenge.

Hanzo thinks of the pity that he had regarded Genji with, all those years of their lives— the thought that it might have been better directed the other way eats at him like an acid. Genji’s childish envy of him no longer feels amusing, but virulent; Hanzo has always worn silence like a sheen of power, immovability and calm masking his flaws where they don’t supplement his talent, and sometimes even he forgets that he does it for his own benefit. But the disconnect between the storm in his mind and the steadiness of his hand— he’s never been able to fool his brother. He’d always assumed it’d been the same, the other way around.

His stomach turns.

It only takes him a week to become slowly but surely disgusted with his inability to bring the matter to a conclusion in his mind. His father was right; he must come to a decision. On the eighth consecutive day of spending too much time in the shower, scalding the memory of cooled blood from his hands, he opens his eyes to the dim light that filters through his bedroom window.

He has been avoiding Genji. Genji has been avoiding the entire clan. Avoiding meetings, responsibilities, confrontation, family, death.

Summer is fast approaching. The walls of his room begin to feel like a cage. Staring with bitter and dark-circled eyes at the clear, star-studded sky, he breathes the air that reaches him through the open screen, refusing to curl his hands into fists. He sleeps, or tries to. He wakes the next day.

He picks up his sword again and doesn’t let go.

The next time Hanzo greets death, it is in the middle of a snowstorm, and it just brushes past. It leaves him with the absence of his father, and Hanzo allows himself to be left behind. Within a year he personally invites it back to take a few of his parents’ contemporaries, his blade balanced in his hands. He readies himself for its arrival, thinking himself prepared, but too late he realizes he has forgotten.

Death is not a teacher. It does not impart things as frivolous as lessons to be learned.

What it does leave: an infirmity he can feel taking hold in his father’s bones until it is inseparable from the marrow, and nothing is left that can be done.

What it does leave: the life leaking from his brother’s eyes as his blood stains the whites of his fingernails.

What it does leave: Hanzo, somehow, alone.

Genji breathes his last in his twenty-fifth year of life and learns absolutely nothing from dying.

Hanzo lives, sleeps, wakes, remembers. Picks up his weapons and his pride, and suffers: grief so powerful it sours his stomach and clouds his vision, regret so thick it renders his eyes unseeing in the middle of the day; doubt and apathy that war like stormclouds, shaking his katas and feeding the growing tremor in his swordsman’s grip. The premature grey that streaks his temples by the first anniversary looks like ashes in his hair.

His mind offers him mores, some plaintive, some furious, each more contrived than the last, floating up from the self-loathing that leaches into his memories like bitter water from a poisoned well. Hanzo drowns himself in its depths, and when that is not enough, takes the rope into his own hands.

Ten years later, he catches himself thinking. Had it been ten years ago? Or eleven?

The clan’s strings do not catch him when he cuts because he severs them of his own will, knowing every knot and tangle by heart, having put them there himself. He throws the whole of his being into betraying himself, and doesn’t look back because he is determined to let this fray— in the past, from where he has dragged this debacle with him— but the question of whether he will return is never asked.

Hanamura is his home. It is his empire. An empty grave. Death has left it to him.

Only when remembering Genji feels less like a quicksand trap of memories and more like a bitter pill he is resigned to swallow, does he return. Lessons in death are not easily forgotten.

When the cyborg appears before him Hanzo had already made another choice, tied his life back down into a semblance of order around duty and incense and laid his demons to rest with the conclusion that death had finally claimed what was its. He thinks he is prepared, the semblance of order he had made of the hand dealt to him, the things he has decided to learn, all things he is ready to have stolen from him yet again.

But Death only brushes past.

Again.

Again! But there is no use; Hanzo seethes, and shakes, and goes so far as to demand, but his dead brother is alive. And he is not a lesson to be learned.

And even if he had been, even if he is, it's already too late. Genji has beaten him to it.

Hanzo stares into his brother’s eyes, and— if he had felt robbed that night, the night Genji had died and bled at his hands but refused, for years afterward, to die— the only way to describe the way he feels now is cheated.


End file.
